Nearly five years later, not one grave has been proven — but millions in taxpayer dollars have vanished into what increasingly looks like a national hoax.
The hoax goes on.
It’s been nearly five years since the bombshell revelation was released that the graves of 215 children had been found at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School. Since then, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation was given over $12 million to exhume and identify the remains. While the band made the money vanish, it didn’t move a single teaspoon of dirt trying to find a grave. The hoax of the child burials is now moving into fraud territory as some people are pocketing some serious coin from it.
We can’t just let this go. Bands across the nation are emulating the Tk’emlups approach as it’s a lucrative venture. It’s also causing more social division among people already in a societally dysfunctional state. At a couple of reserves with alleged grave sites, some excavations of alleged graves took place, only to discover that the graves did not exist. Rest assured, the bands won’t make that mistake again. They will just keep demanding money not to look.
Tk’emlups Chief Rosanne Casimir said in 2022 that the nation’s approach is an ongoing process of “exhumation to memorialization.” Ongoing indeed. Once questions began arising from people about how many children had been exhumed, the government leapt into the issue by sealing the records of the alleged Tk’emlups investigation. The band was supposed to produce regular reports of their progress in investigating the alleged graves as part of the conditions of their funding. Rather than admit the reports were either trash or non-existent, the government covered it up for the band. It’s not the band’s money. It’s taxpayers’ money, and we deserve to know where it went.